Forty Days for Life, a community-based pro-life group, kicks off their campaign of prayer, fasting, and presence today. According to the group’s website:

Forty Days for Life takes a determined, peaceful approach to showing local communities the consequences of abortion in their own neighborhoods, for their own friends and families. It puts into action a desire to cooperate with God in the carrying out of his plan for the end of abortion in America.

The 40-day campaign tracks biblical history, where God used forty-day periods to transform individuals, communities . . . and the entire world. From Noah in the flood to Moses on the mountain to the disciples after Christ’s resurrection, it is clear that God sees the transformative value of his people accepting and meeting a forty-day challenge.

(via Amy Welborn)

A news report has just announced that John Cornwell has changed his mind about Pius XII: “‘Hitler’s Pope’ Author Modifies Views.”

Can I have one moment of gloating? I was right, and he was wrong. I was right, and he was wrong. Na-na-na-na-na!

Ah, well. Now back to our regularly scheduled programing.

In 2004, South Korean scientist Hwang Woo-suk shocked the world by announcing he had successfully cloned human embryos in his lab. Key parts of Hwang’s research were later shown to be phony, however, and the scientist was indicted in 2006 on “embezzlement and bioethics law violations linked to faked stem-cell research.” Surprisingly, the fraud isn’t stopping Australia from considering a patent of the technology:

Australia’s intellectual property office (IP Australia) said it was considering the patent request by Seoul National University based on Hwang’s falsified research. Hwang is listed as one of 18 inventors in the patent application.

IP Australia said the decision to grant a patent was based on whether the technology was new or involved an inventive step, not whether an invention performed as claims.

“During examination, IP Australia considered that information relating to the falsification of research results involving Dr. Hwang were related to issues of utility (usefulness) and not matter that could be objected to in examination,” David Johnson, Acting Commissioner of Patents, said in a statement.

So, patents are granted in Australia “based on whether the technology . . . involved an inventive step.” Faking one’s results certainly is “inventive,” but I’m not sure that’s what IP Australia has in mind.

In his Weekly Standard article “Clinging to Her Religion: The Faith Journey of Sarah Palin,” Christian Terry Eastland rises above the hysteria and the noise in the best article yet on Sarah Palin’s religion. A sample:

Kroon [Palin’s pastor at Wasilla Bible Church] says that his church has had programs for children with special needs, that it supports the pro-life Heart Reach Pregnancy Center, which helps women in crisis pregnancies, and that it participates in house-building efforts undertaken by Habitat for Humanity. Rarely does Wasilla Bible have outside speakers, the most recent one a leader of Jews for Jesus. The church sometimes promotes events sponsored by outside groups, such as a recent Focus on the Family conference on overcoming unwanted same-sex attraction held in Anchorage.

Those who attend Wasilla Bible tend to be social conservatives. Kroon describes himself as “pro-life.” But the church, he says, doesn’t get involved in politics. “We’re extreme the other way. We put everything else down when we worship, whether it’s politics or anything else. The church is the church. Worship is worship.”

As Ramadan draws to an end, the Pontifical Council for Interreligious Dialogue has sent its annual greetings to the Muslim faithful, urging Christians and Muslims to come together in safeguarding the dignity of the family, the “fundamental cell of society.”

I found this message of especial interest in light of Pope Benedict’s September mission intention: “That, faithful to the sacrament of matrimony, every Christian family may cultivate the values of love and communion in order to be a small evangelizing community, sensitive and open to the material and spiritual needs of its brothers.” Evangelization, the council letter reminds us, does not just extend outward in ministry to our non-Christian brethren, but it can also draw them in as friends and fellow evangelizers.

Some highlights from the letter:

One of the documents of the Second Vatican Council, Gaudium et Spes, which deals with the Church in the modern world, states: “The well-being of the individual person and of human and Christian society is intimately linked with the healthy condition of that community produced by marriage and family. Hence Christians and all men who hold this community in high esteem sincerely rejoice in the various ways by which men today find help in fostering this community of love and perfecting its life, and by which parents are assisted in their lofty calling. . . .”

These words give us an opportune reminder that the development of both the human person and of society depends largely on the healthiness of the family! How many people carry, sometimes for the whole of their life, the weight of the wounds of a difficult or dramatic family background? . . . Christians and Muslims can and must work together to safeguard the dignity of the family, today and in the future.
. . .

I need only remind you that the family is the first school in which one learns respect for others, mindful of the identity and the difference of each one. Inter-religious dialogue and the exercise of citizenship cannot but benefit from this.

And, from the Pontifical Council for the Family, under Cardinal Antonelli, comes this: The Christian family should strive to be characterized by “profound unity, respect of differences, generous openness to life” and “the care of the weakest.” “The beauty of the family,” writes the cardinal, “ must be witnessed in a concrete way . . . [by] building genuine Christian families that can be a burning fire, a point of reference for all.”

Who said saints were only forged in monasteries?